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Every business owner knows how to wear a lot of hats. When first
striking out on your own, you have a hand in finances, marketing, product design, and everything
in between. But as your company grows, you need to empower
your employees to feel that same sense of independence.

Autonomy is one of our fundamental human needs--an essential
component of a healthy workplace. "It fills our need for
intrinsic motivation," says Ben Dattner, an organizational
psychologist and founder of Dattner Consulting. By that he means our
need to be driven by personal interest and enjoyment.

Employees that feel empowered are happier, more motivated, more
committed to their jobs, and less stressed. The latter is
especially true for demanding workplaces since independence gives
workers a sense of control in stressful situations.

The benefits for business owners are clear: "[Greater autonomy]
can lead to lower turnover and higher levels of creativity,
innovation, and even performance," says Dustin Jundt, an
organizational psychologist at Saint Louis University.

Consider these three tips to give employees independence without
giving up control:

1. Specify the goal, not the means. "As you
grow, you don't want the organization to be so hierarchical that
it can't be adaptive," Dattner says. "You want people to
experiment and make game-time decisions."

To encourage creativity, give clear guidelines for a project's
quality, deadline, and purpose, but leave the rest up to your
employees. Your team may not execute the project exactly as you
would have, but their strategy may be just as good or better.

2. Set up checks and balances. As a
business owner, you need to be passionate about your ideas, but
that enthusiasm can become a liability when there's no room for
second opinions.

"Every leader is subject to biases and errors," Dattner says.
"You need to build in mechanisms for being proven wrong and allow
the freedom to debate other strategies." To do that, avoid
surrounding yourself with "yes-men."

"You want confident advisors who will push back and help vet your
ideas rather than validating your own rose-tinted glasses,"
Dattner adds.

3. Know yourself. As you allow others more
freedom and responsibility, understanding yourself can help ease
the transition.

"You have to be pretty secure to say, I'm going to hire a finance
person who has more experience in finance than I do and I won't
understand everything they're doing," Dattner says. Try taking a
free, online personality test recommended by
Dattner to assess your strengths and weaknesses. The online
test was created in the 1990s by a psychology professor at
Penn State University, DuBois. A free app version, iPsy also became available in 2011.

It's important to understand your own feelings and have a sense
of what others are experiencing around you, which is referred to
as emotional intelligence. You can then identify what motivates
each of your employees and empower them in ways they'll find
fulfilling.